Page 66 of Hopelessly Teavoted
She waggled her eyebrows.
“Where?”
“There would be many delicious places to choose from, butfor right now, I think I’d choose the press of your lips against mine. The way I miss already.”
She bit her lip. “I have an idea.”
“I love ideas.”
“From a show.”
“What do you know, I alsoloveshows.”
Vickie giggled and propped her head onto her elbow. “Can you get us plastic wrap?”
“Your wish is my command.” He snapped his fingers, and the roll appeared on the arm of her chair.
“It’s an old trick, but a good one.” She stood up. “Face me.” Her voice was thick, honeyed. He wanted to taste it. He needed to taste it.
She stretched the plastic wrap out, carefully tearing an arm’s length of it off on the perforated edge. “You hit me like a hurricane tonight,” she murmured, and she leaned down to where he sat, raising the wrap between them.
“Is that bad?”
“No.” She leaned closer. “It’s just big.”
It wasn’t quite a kiss, lips against thin plastic, but it wasn’t quite not, either, with the plushness of hers against his, and the desperate, deadly desire to bite her bottom lip unspooling in his stomach. He wanted to reach up and touch her face; he had everything he needed already in this one lingering, chaste kiss.
“I think I could lose myself in this,” he said.
She pulled back and lowered the barrier. “Don’t.” Her face was drawn. “You mean too much to me to lose.”
He swallowed, unable to collect his emotions completely. “I won’t.”
“The tracing spell, then?” She stepped back and toward the fire.
“Yes, it’s ready.” He joined her, snapping to still the spoon in the cauldron for a moment.
“What do I need to do?”
“A strand of hair, lit on fire and dropped into the cauldron,should do the trick,” he said, and Vickie, cheeks still flushed with the almost kiss and all the emotion that he had wrung from her, nodded and complied.
Her scent, lavender and strawberry, brushed his nose as she stepped back from the fire.
This pretending was going to hurt in the morning when he woke up without her.
Az wasn’t sure he cared, though.
CHAPTER 20Victoria
Vickie would have to go home as soon as they were done with the spell. There was no way she could stay the night. She had to work in a few hours. And if she didn’t get some sleep after the enormity of finding out about the soul seal, and then actually considering the soul seal, of the emotions and longing tied up in that plastic-wrap kiss, of all of it on top of not being able to touch, on top of their fuckup six years ago, she might lose herself in real feelings. Lose the friendship and the only family she had now. She wasn’t willing to let him go, even if they were just friends, now that she finally had him back. And the idea of being eternally bound to him at some point, well, it wasn’t as terrifying as it maybe should have been.
But it was awfully soon for that kind of decision.
He deserved her certainty, and if she moved forward and acted on the sneaking feelings that were about now, and more than sex, and not just history, and a delicate dance of never touching, she had to be absofuckinglutely sure. That type of certainty should take her time.
It was fine to fuck around and brainstorm creative ways to get off without fully touching until her legs shook and she screamed his name, but she didn’t want to play the part of the game where she fell asleep next to the familiar form of Azrael,on a separate bed or from the other side of a wall. That was too close to always.
Vickie didn’t want to know how much she could pretend not to be tempted to kill him just to feel his lips on hers, without anything between them, the moment before he died, for it felt earnest, and it felt like they could love each other, really love each other. A part of her crumbled at the fear of that it wasloved, and notlove. Could love go on without touch? Would it wither in disuse? The fear that what he had done in the library—what they had done when they danced into more than just friendship—had been some sort of twisted blip, pounded into her in thigh-clenching enthusiastic rhythm from the record player. That same part had blossomed again when he admitted that it was now too. Fear and hope, past and present, things were complicated.
